Maybe it wouldn’t have seemed quite so bad had they not been excitedly plugging it for the best part of a fortnight.

Or perhaps it might have turned out more favourably had it not been immediately preceded with a Hollywood-style movie trailer packed with all the biggest explosions, car chases and gun fights from his most successful action blockbusters.

Then again, even without all that, Bruce Willis’ appearance on BBC’s The One Show last week would still have been one of the biggest toe-curlers since Aladdin mistakenly put his favourite slippers on a boil-wash.

Still, you’ve got to give it to host Matt Baker for trying to keep the energy levels up right from the start.

“Yesss! Bruce Willis on The One Show, can you believe it?” he yelled while punching the air – as though he was a 12-year-old Willis fan who’d won a competition to meet his hero, rather than a professional television presenter who actually does this sort of thing each day for a living.

Bruce, on the other hand, could barely muster enough energy to finish his own sentences, resulting in him muttering monosyllabically into his shirt for half and hour like a man who was severely jet-lagged.

And fair play to Alex Jones too, she did her best to fill all the pregnant pauses with something, anything, other than stultifying dead air.

On the sofa to plug the latest (and fifth) film in the inexorable Die Hard franchise, the best Bruce seemed to be able to do was reassure his fans there’d be plenty of loud noises and flashing lights to sufficiently distract from the clanging hollowness of the script.

“There’s a lot of Die Hard oomph in there,” he murmured, before pausing to tilt his head and stare into the camera for what seemed like an eternity.

“Oh, it definitely has oomph,” replied Alex, beginning to panic.

“Yeah, a little oomph,” whispered Bruce, a distracted look playing across his face as if struggling to recall whether or not he’d left the gas on.

“Yes, oomph,” said Alex, her eyes now completely glazing over as a voice no doubt shouted something like “Quick, cut to Mike Dilger’s VT about badger baiting on the Pennines!” in her ear-piece.

However, one thing we did learn from the whole mortifying mess was that Bruce wasn’t too keen on his movie’s admittedly awful name – A Good Day To Die Hard.

But having already gone down the route of naming the four preceding films Die Hard, Die Harder, Die Hardest and Dying’s Not Hard, It’s Flamin’ Solid, Mun (which was filmed in Ystradgynlais for tax break purposes) it seems that all the best titles had already been taken.

But hopefully things will improve by the time Die Hard 6 is ready to film, the plot of which will apparently centre around Willis’ Detective John McClane character going up against an order of elderly terrorist nuns who want to melt down all the Vatican’s gold and turn it into a 24-carat nuclear missile.